You Can Tell Who's Asking: What the Web's Questions Are Made Of, and Where They Come From

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.24106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Questions scraped from the web are used across academia and industry as a proxy for what people want to know. Across QA training data, retrieval benchmarks, and content strategy, questions on a page are assumed to reflect human intent. We test this assumption at scale by extracting 13.4B question occurrences across 110 FineWeb snapshots (2013-2025), and report three findings. First, you can tell who is asking: provenance (the host/page of questions